Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Michael Ondaatje
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: September 12
Author
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Ondaatje
Past
Stills
Still
Safely
Settled
Place
More quotes by Michael Ondaatje
Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.
Michael Ondaatje
One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Michael Ondaatje
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
Michael Ondaatje
I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.
Michael Ondaatje
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
Michael Ondaatje
I promised to tell you how one falls in love.
Michael Ondaatje
What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
Michael Ondaatje
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.
Michael Ondaatje
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.
Michael Ondaatje
A novel is a mirror walking down a road
Michael Ondaatje
There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.
Michael Ondaatje
There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there's a reason for going to the next scene.
Michael Ondaatje
It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
Michael Ondaatje
If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
Michael Ondaatje
Fathers die.You keep on loving them in any way you can.You can't hide him away in your heart.
Michael Ondaatje
Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.
Michael Ondaatje
She had always wanted words, she loved them grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
Michael Ondaatje
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
Michael Ondaatje
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
Michael Ondaatje
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael Ondaatje
